Spanish Conquests in the New World

The Spanish Conquests in the New World (1519-1533) were a series of wars fought by New Spain in hopes of conquering additional lands to their empire. The Spanish managed to conquer the southern parts of North America, the Caribbean, and much of South America from the Aztec Empire, Inca Empire, and other tribes.

Background
The voyages of Christopher Columbus between 1492 and 1504 opened up a New World, but it soon became exploited by the Old one, and destruction followed discovery.

New World Colonies
Spain's colonization of Middle and South America's pagan cultures was ostensibly a Christianizing mission. But those adventurers who overtook the dirty work of conquest - the conquistadors - were tough, ruthless opportunists in search of booty. After all, these savages were ignorant of the Gospel; and they did moreover possess fabulous quantities of gold.

Imperial Strength
Prior to the Europeans' incursions, the Aztecs' crushing of other Mesoamerican peoples led to the creation of their empire. They had widened their dominions through the Valley of Mexico in a series of conquests from the 16th century. Over the same period, the Incas had founded an even larger empire - over 3,500 km across - conquering civilizations like the Chimu. On the eve of the Spanish conquest both empires were consolidating their power.

Wars
It was prophesied that the plumed serpent god, Quetzacoatl, would one day appear from the eastern ocean in human form. When this happened, the destruction that the priests had been staving off with their animal and human sacrifices could be postponed no longer: Aztec civilization would meet its catastrophic end. When Hernan Cortes arrived from Spain in 1519, he was believed to be that serpent god. Yet the myth was of Spanish, rather than Mexican, origin; it was encouraged by Cortes in order to intimidate the people he was conquering.

That Cortes and his little band of men were able to subdue such an incredibly powerful empire was extraordinary. His courage, charisma, and ruthlessness are not in doubt. Nor is the cunning with which he exploited the existing enmities among the native peoples of Mesoamerica.

Alliances and Atrocities
Cortes took Malinche, a Nahua woman whose people were hostile to the Aztecs, as hi smistress and interpreter. with her help, he allied with the Tlaxcaltecas in what is now Tlaxcala in Mexico: they too felt threatened by the Aztecs. At Cholula, west of Puebla, Cortes and his men killed the male population, without doubt at the urging ot the Tlaxcaltecas, who wanted to punish the Cholulans for submitting to Aztec rule. "We fought so hard", said Cortes, "in two hours more than 3,000 men were killed".

This atrocity sent a message to Mexico's peoples. The scale of the slaughter the Spanish had been able to commit with their steel weapons and their firearms was scarcely imaginable to them. Hence the nervous adulation bestowed upon Cortes and his company upon arrival at the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, though ruler Moctezuma II seems to have taken Cortes's claims to be an "ambassador" at face value. The conquistador repaid his hospitality by taking him hostage. For six months Cortes ruled the empire with Moctezuma as his puppet. Then his lieutenant, Pedro de Alvarado, took fright at the talk of a revolt and massacred the Aztec nobility. Cortes and his men had to fight their way out of the rebellion that ensued. Moctezuma was among those who died. Cortes was lucky to escape with 200 survivors.

Unequal struggles
In the months that followed, Cortes besieged Tenochtitlan, now stricken with the smallpox the conquistadors had unwittingly brought with them. Over 40% of the population died. Under Cuauhtemoc, the nephew of Moctezuma, the Aztecs resisted bravely. And they held a number of advantages, as Cortes and his men were aware. Frankly, Cortes acknowledged, they were daunted: "They had calculated that if 25,000 of them died for every one of us, they would finish with us first, for they were many and we were but few". The city's situation - on a series of islands in a shallow lake, connected to the mainland and to each other by narrow causeways - allowed defenders to focus their efforts more effectively. Even so, it was only a matter of time before the Spanish and their allies prevailed: Tenochtitlan fell on 13 August 1521.

European firepower and know-how had not been enough by themselves to overwhelm the Aztecs, buthad given the Spanish attack an extra edge.

Inca complacency
In the 1530s Francisco Pizarro took Peru against still more astounding odds. The Inca king, Atahualpa, had an army of 80,000 to Pizarro's 128 men. The latter did, of course, have weapons never before seen in South America - arquebuses and cannon, as well as steel-bladed swords. And they had horses, until then unknown on the continent. But in the end it was Inca complacency that allowed Pizarro's party to probe deep into the empire completely unscathed. Triumphant victor of a civil war that had wreaked the Inca empire for the last three years, and with his rival and half-brother captured, Atahualpa had no reason to take a handful of "bandits and thieves" seriously. The two sides met eventually, at the city of Cajamrca, in northern Peru. The conquistadors kept to their Christian commitment by bringing a priest out to preach to the Inca king. When Atahualpa brushed him aside, the Spanish had a pretext for attacking, and opened up with cannon and arquebuses. Although their noise and smoke had far greater impact than their penetrative power, the cold steel of the conquistadors cut down the Inca troops, shocked into passivity.

In a few hours of one-sided fighting, Pizarro's men killed 7,000 Incas; then they seized Atahualpa. This proved so astonishing an outrage that the watching soldiers could barely believe it was happening. He was their divinity: now he was a prisoner; the Inca state had been decapitated. Holding Atahualpa captive in Cajamrca, the conquistadors demanded an enormous ransom, and then garroted the king anyway, setting another puppet, Manqo Qapac, in his place. Qapac quickly grew disenchanted and slipped away into the mountains. He led a belated fightback, but the Incas were finally defeated in 1536. Once again the courage of the Spanish conquistadors is as staggering as ther unscrupulousness: holed up in Cuzco, they saw off a siege by some 40,000 of Qapac's men.

Aftermath
In just a few years, and with only a tiny commitment of manpower, Spain had won a vast American empire. Its riches underwrote Spain's emergence as a superpower.

Further Conquests
Other conquistadors took other territories: Vasco Nunez de Balboa in Panama; Francisco de Orellana in the Amazon; Pedro de Valdivia in Chile - such adventurers grew fabulously wealthy.

Deadly Diseases
The cruelty of the colonists was dwarfed in destructiveness by the ravages of the infections they introduced. In every region of the Americas, epidemologists estimate that 90% of the population had been killed by disease within just 50 years of the arrivals of the Europeans.

Under Subjection
Mexico and Peru remained viceroyalties of "New Spain", despite the attempt of Tupac Amaru, a descendant of the Inca kings, to throw out the invaders in 1572.